Preference for our game assets

Making isometric characters are a pain unless you make them in 3d and use bones to move the body parts and then render out the various needed angles. (But you have to consider them holding objects and so on.. a real pain unless you are getting paid for it.) Thus, I tend to stay away from them. SNES style RPG games that were isometric would be something I'd like to tackle at some point though. They generally use only 10 frames for 4 direction movement.

Flat, Sonic Hedgehog and Rockman style characters wouldn't be too hard. And since I want someone to make a FAST pace Sonic/Zool style game for the Mac, I'll give it a shot.

I think I will switch to TGA. I realize that anyone can convert, but if it saves time, then all the better. I think I will also try to focus on providing enough graphics for complete games like I mentioned. Since I have many 3d models (high-polygon count), I will render them out for some R-Type style games.

As for low-count 3d models - to be used in 3d engines. Since I am eager for certain games to be made for the Mac, I will make objects and characters. Maybe learn Meshwork for that. I'd like to make some anime style (big heads) golfers, and baseball players. (tennis and volleyball too.) I mean with all you OpenGL pros, is it that hard to whip up a little golf game or tennis game? (tennis is like pong!) Some fighting people, race cars and mechs/ships would also be nice to make.

Every few months, I stock my shelves with the latest Japanese video game screen shots to get inspired. I got some neat stuff planned.

I'm not sure about instruments sounds. I do have drums and precussion and synths, but acoustic instruments... I don't know.. I think you can find enough of them on the net. And on top of that, to accurately playback a Piano, you need to sample it as different octaves, otherwise you are stretching things far too much.

I put some nice goodies on Mark S's book. I am pretty proud with the tiles that will appear on the CD. Very SNESish. And there are some neat backgrounds for RPGs as well.

BTW.. Some graphic assets on this site are in the PD, and most likely old 8bit stuff. Nothing I can do about that unless I want to pull a Ted Tunner. My work is all done in Photoshop.

Also, I'm wondering if the car sprites are handy at all? I supppose if the tires moved, they would have been better. I was hoping for retro style top down racing games or even a frogger game from those sprites.

I often get nasty emails from PC devs about not letting them use my graphic assets. That really grates my nerves. JUST GO AWAY I want to say! It is my work, and I DECIDE how they should be used. Obviously, people are using goggle and finding this site to collect graphic assets. If you see any of our stuff in PC games, let me know. I may let PC devs use my art but charge them a HUGE fee someday

Ok my thoughts are all over the place. (No order.) To summarize. My hope is to offer enough complete CLASSIC style game assets for educational purposes. Thus, are tutorials can utilize them to help people go from A to Z to building certain types of games. Next, I hope to provide assets that can be used during dev of a game. IMHO, a game really needs a full-time artist. But to attract one, you have to be able to show some build. The build can use our assets, but ideally, the finished product should have some nice original art. (But, you are more than welcome to use anything here for your final Mac game.) In the past, tile size and many things were kept small because of HD space. Now, we have space, we can improve the quality of the assets. Thanks for your input, please add more...

A thought about image formats. I'd imagine that if I was using sprites, it'd be nice to have them in a format that keeps transparency (PNG, Photoshop). Otherwise, you could provide 8-bit masks along with the sprites. (Not sure if you do that already, I've never felt the need to use any of your resources yet...)

Quote:Originally posted by Nimrod A thought about image formats. I'd imagine that if I was using sprites, it'd be nice to have them in a format that keeps transparency (PNG, Photoshop). Otherwise, you could provide 8-bit masks along with the sprites. (Not sure if you do that already, I've never felt the need to use any of your resources yet...)

Please no images in Photoshop format. It's proprietary and not everyone owns it. The absolute best non-lossy format that retains alpha information is PNG. And developers can use Quicktime to convert it to anything else they might want to use.

Also please create graphic assets at millions of colors and large sizes. If need be, the developer can reduce the color depth and scale the images, but if they're too small, or at too low of a color depth to begin with, there's no way to fix them.

Yes, I wouldn't want to use PSD format for the fact that not everyone can use Photoshop. I've had luck with TGA, but sometimes found some quirks with PNG format. (Like losing my alpha channel after saving.)

How about 3d format? I haven't worked in Meshwork, and my guess it isn't so easy to create models when comapred to some other tools. To people want OBJ, 3dmf, 3ds, LWO??? I'm not sure if textures or bones would be retained unless saved in native Meshwork format. I'll have to study this area more and talk to the OpenGL devs here. I'm interested to know what they think my models should "weigh under." ie. Polygon count/size of model.

Switching to audio. When saving AIFF, there are many compression setttings. I haven't explored the differences much. So I tend to not use them. But uncompressed 44K, 16bit sound can take up space. Anyone in the know, want to give me some tips? Also, is AIFF still your preferred format, or would you like MP3 or WAV??

Going by what a lot of people have said on the boards I'd say having them in native Meshwork format would be useful to most people.

Carlos if you don't want to create in Meshwork it can import a few different file types, can't remember which off the top of my head, so you could make them, import them into Meshwork, and save them. The only realy problem with that is texturing, often the models will lose texture information on import.

I must say from personal experience that UV-mapping a texture onto a reasonably complicated model is an artform in itself, and a *major* exercise in patience.

I'm not sure this is something you'd want to do but I thought I'd throw it out there. For things like your interface graphics, (which are real nice btw) I think it'd help if you'd include the photoshop source files for final graphic. I wanted to implement some of the interface graphics, but I couldn't just because there weren't buttons that said what I needed to be said. It'd be really neat if you could include photoshop styles. (if that's how your doing it I dunno) For instance on the Inkubator board the artist posted a photoshop style for the cool ice text effect. Things like that benefit those with photoshop a lot. But I realize not everyone has photoshop so this would (hopefully) be in addition to instead of a replacement for image files. (in whatever format) I know you had blank buttons but still it is really hard (for me at least) to try and match what I put in them to the other text. I love the idea of the big headed character thing. I want to make a quick paced original-idea arcade game after I finish my current project.

The resources should be sub-catagorized to fit into their types and possibley genres (that ones a hard call)

But their should be a break down of
Tile Backgrounds
Sprites
3D models
3D textures
Sounds
Music

I guess source code and reference material should also be included
in the break downs...knowing where to go with the resources you've got is important too.

What ever else I'm missing in there...I don't think you should have to have one file format or other..but a label to let us know what the format is and maybe a readme that points to conversion methods for the format would be good. Maybe a little "?" icon for that...

OBJ are very easy to write, but they do not contain built in texture support. So, in otherwords, you would most likely be exporting just the placement information from your 3d editor and nothing more, a white 3d mesh.

Yes, it was my hope long ago to break down our assets into lists that make things easier to find. If you like this idea, please help me convince Griggs. As for a link to a conversion program, I think everyone knows Graphic Converter does it all 8)

From what I have seen, some programs do well in retaining OBJ textures and some do not. But as far as I know, it does support textures.

My past tiles were of various sizes. At first I starte with 32x32. What is the size that most of you prefer? And for sprites?

I would like to see some mech 3D models also. Once my Mac shows up in the next week or (GOD I HOPE not) two, I plan on working on my code to load 3D models. I would like to see .3ds or .obj file format. I have done some reading and can't remember for sure but .obj will not save the texture info, but you use openGL to apply the texture if I remember right? Problem with .3ds is it's 3D Studio's file format and wouldn't you need to own the program to use the models in your game? I think object files are free but not sure? I would like to see more tiles done in either 32x32, 64x64, or 128x128 with 32bit color and alpha included. I like the .png format also but .tga works to. I would like to see some tile sets that could be used to make a RTS like TA or Starcraft. Yes music is important as is sound fx. Trying to make a game without the necessary data is really frustrating and somewhat discouraging. Here is my wish list in order of importance

1. 3D Models
2. 32bit (Whatever size as long as its a power of 2) tiles or textures
3. Sound FX
4. Music 16bit at least and 44khz stereo

But whatever Carlos wants to do is fine with me because anything is better than nothing!!! =) BTW what 3D modeling program on the Mac will you be using? Thanks

Quote:Originally posted by Camacho Yes, it was my hope long ago to break down our assets into lists that make things easier to find. If you like this idea, please help me convince Griggs. As for a link to a conversion program, I think everyone knows Graphic Converter does it all 8)

From what I have seen, some programs do well in retaining OBJ textures and some do not. But as far as I know, it does support textures.

My past tiles were of various sizes. At first I starte with 32x32. What is the size that most of you prefer? And for sprites?

More input please!

I recommend making tiles and sprites at least 128 X 128 for maximum flexibility. As I said before, we can always scale them down if we need to and having larger sizes available could extend the usable lifespan of the graphics. (Screen sizes seem to be growing all the time.)